Clause 1
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
9:10 am
Andrew Selous (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; South West Bedfordshire, Conservative)
I welcome you back to the third sitting of our Committee, Mr. Chope. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. We are now back in what is for most of us the more familiar territory of a Public Bill Committee. For me, at least, the evidence-taking sitting was my first experience of that process. I found it useful, and it certainly brought back memories of being in a Select Committee in the previous Parliament. On a more serious note, I believe that we obtained some very useful evidence from our witnesses, some of which I shall refer to during our deliberations today.
Amendment No. 70 and its consequential amendments—Nos. 96, 97 and 98—would retain the status of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission, the Child Support Agency’s successor body, as an Executive agency of the Department for Work and Pensions, rather than changing it to that of a non-departmental public body. We touched on that subject during the evidence-taking sitting, but not in great detail, so I hope that you will allow at least some debate, Mr. Chope, on why the Government are making that change.
It might be useful briefly to remind the Committee of the distinction between a non-departmental public body and an Executive agency. I am informed by the Library that the term “non-departmental public body” was first used by Sir Leo Pilatsky in 1980 and was described thus:
“A body which has a role in the processes of national government, but is not a government department, or part of one, and which accordingly operates to a greater or lesser extent at arm’s length from ministers.”
The Library brief goes on to say that
“Their distance from government means that the day-to-day decisions they make are independent as they are removed from ministers and Civil Servants.”
In contrast, an Executive agency will have a chief executive who will report to a Minister against specific targets.
A number of questions therefore come to mind, and when the Minister replies I would be grateful if he were to tell the Committee whether the Department’s view is that over-meddling by Ministers was one of the problems with the agency. Were Ministers spending too much time distracting senior management from their tasks in the CSA, and was that unwelcome? What lessons can we learn from ministerial involvement in the past?
The setting up of a new non-departmental public body will have public expenditure implications. I have read the regulatory impact assessment and the notes to the Bill, but I cannot find the specific cost associated with establishing a new body rather than continuing with the CSA and perhaps changing its name. Could the extra money be better spent?
There are questions too on the timing of setting up such a body. There is wide agreement across the House that it has been a very troubled agency, under Conservative and Labour Governments, since it was set up in 1993. On the face of it, it is curious that Ministers are taking a more hands-off approach, when there are so many problems within the agency and so much uncertainty over the future of CMEC. There is a huge question about the number of parents who will or will not move to private voluntary agreements, but that is just one of the problems. I have a number of questions about why the Department is going down that route.
I remind the Committee that Janet Allbeson, the last witness in the second evidence-taking session on Tuesday afternoon, referring to the change to a non-departmental public body, said:
“It is quite hard to see why it is necessary. It will cost a lot, and it will take a lot of time and resources to set up...I think that Ministers are quite keen to put it at arm’s length from them”——[Official Report, Child Maintenance and Other Payments Public Bill Committee, 17 July 2007; c. 84.]
One of my questions is exactly how much that will cost.
I hope that the Minister can reassure us. I do not believe that any member of the Committee, least of all the ministerial team, has anything other than the best intentions. I believe that they want to make this work, and that the Committee is united across party lines. We all want an organisation that will work, and detailed scrutiny and probing in Committee will contribute towards that.
To conclude, I would like some form of reassurance from the Minister on how that arm’s length relationship will work. The public, parents who have not been getting maintenance, non-resident parents who have been extremely frustrated by inaccurate assessments and the way in which they have been treated by the agency and, most importantly, children want reassurance that Ministers are not pushing off the body to arm’s length so that they can say that it does not have so much to do with them, as was the case when it was an Executive agency. That is the sum of my concerns about the amendment, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.